Posts Tagged ‘gaggleamp’

The low hanging fruit for ambassadorship is Employee Advocacy and yet many (not to say most) companies are failing miserably at it.

Why and what to get it on the rails of for many one of the burning questions on the table.

4 golden rules for Employee Advocacy and Sharing

When it comes to Employee Advocacy there are 4 golden and simple rules:

You employees follow your company accounts

There is a culture of sharing

The WIIIFM factor (for the employees) of posts is high

Content is generated by the employees

Let’s take a look at the above rules and answer the question of why and what

Employees follow corporate accounts

This seems so obvious but it is not. Sometimes because companies have not asked, sometimes because of ignorance and even sometime because employee choose not to. Few companies take the time to promote their own social accounts internally even though externally thousands of dollars/euros are spent to get followers/fans. Companies assume employees will find and follow the accounts anyway. But how do you expect your employees to look for them and even going one step further to share from there.

Why not run an internal campaign to promote social media accounts and content as first step to true Employee Advocacy?

Sharing culture

It must be said that some people and even nations share more than others. Us Belgians are renounded for not sharing. Sharing must be encouraged (via the social media policy) and done by example. The management team and the social media lead by example for the rest of the organization to follow. How do you expect employees to share what management and others do not share themselves.

Social media usage (also for private reasons during worktime) must be encouraged but forced upon your employees.

Oh by-the-way, the corporate account might want to share some of the content posted by its employees and this without being told to do so.

WIIIFM

People share if the content they share makes them look good of entertaining to their audience, friends, fans and followers. As a company post creator you should keep that in mind and not the promotion of company products and/or services. Most company post do not hold the potential for people to share and look good!

User-Generated Content

Sharing is a 2-way process and successful posts have a high level of human factor embedded in them. Showing off your employees (and no, they will not be stolen away from you) and their content will make sharing so much more attractive. One step further is using content from your employees on your corporate account will dramatically increase even more the level of sharing. See it as a pat on the back and recognition for having great content.

And then there are tools

Since Employee Advocacy is seen as the golden egg, companies are looking for ways to make it hatch faster. Here come the tools to help (aka“force”) the sharing actions. These tools even come with incentive programs (gamification) to make sharing even more attractive. But gamification will only work so long. In my humble opinion no longer than 3 to 6 months. And yes, internal promotion will be required. Let me clear these tools have their role to play and are a good way to kick start social sharing of company posts but they are no longtime cure. There are a lot of great tools out there to help you with social sharing and employee advocacy.

However, the real cure lies in adhering to the above 4 rules to make Employee Advocacy a success!

Feel free to agree of disagree with me and sharing this in the comment field below.

2009 is the year that social media breaks through on a large scale. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the likes are adding members quickly. I would like to call this the age of “consumersation of Social Media”.

But 2009 is also the year that we start seeing how naif people are. They post anything and everything on social media. They tarnish not only their own reputation but also that of the companies they work for. Some even get fired for their behavior. But also companies make mistakes with this young and new medium. And then companies do what companies do best: the lock down and lockout social media on the work floor!

They did however not count on the fact that mobile was also becoming a commodity. People creative as they are fled to these mobile devices to take part in social media during work hours. Companies had to do something: The social media policy was born!

2011 – 2012

When I did my survey about social media policies in companies, I found that only 1 in 5 companies had one. Even worse: within those companies less than 10% of the employees knew about it. This still holds true today. Social Media policies were merely a tick in the box.

Companies only made one when disaster struck. They created them as insurance policies.

2015: Time for a social media policy renaissance

We are now 2015 and there 3 important reasons why companies should revisit their social media policy or create one.

Reason #1: We all know that 2015 is the year of the video more specifically live-streaming. Apps such as Meerkat, Periscope or even Blab give every employee a live camera in their hand. What if they start live streaming your production process? What if they stream paying events? And this is just the beginning.

Reason #2: For years companies have been looking for ambassadors. They kept looking outside the company and forgot their biggest assets, the employees. Today Employee Advocacy is stepping into the limelight. Employees can amplify company approved content and get a higher organic reach. Today companies are using a number of tools from rFactr, over GaggleAmp to Sociabble or Smarpshare just to name a few. But what if your employee add comments to post that are not appropriate?

Reason #3: More and more companies are embracing Social Selling (aka the use of social media by sales to find leads and build relationships). We all know how disciplined sales people are and things can go wrong very quickly (and yes, this is black & white). You really need a policy to help this people with their social media.

And finally, people are still naif in this day and age. They are still being fired for posting stupid stuff.

So time for the renaissance of the social media policy. If yours is more than 2 years old, it is time for a revision.

Conclusion

From my current research, it looks like about 50% of the companies have as policy of which some are more than 2 years old. With social election in many companies coming up, it might be a good idea to include some paragraphs about union behavior and use of social within your enterprise.

In my next article I will focus on the how you make/update your current social media policy.

One of trends for 2013 will be “Amplification”. The times that companies and people rely on asking others to redistribute their posts and messages is over. Just like with email, you as a fan are getting too many messages and notifications (many of you are turning them off) and thus ignoring these requests.

As more and more of the employees are becoming active on social media, companies are realizing that they are low hanging fruit when it comes to brand ambassadorship. They want to enlist them as ambassadors and are setting up awareness sessions in the hope these employees will actually help spread the word. .

Companies are also looking for new ways to get their messages promoted. Help is on the way in form of Social Media Amplification Applications. The concept is simple: Leverage employees, partners, customers and fans to share your company’s social media messages on your behalf. The objective is to drive traffic to websites, campaign or blogs to generate leads.

How does it work?

Step 1: Findamplicationapplication

There are a number of these applications available today. I predict that there will be more coming in 2013. GaggleAMP, SocialSeeder, Spread.US and Socialtoaster are in the forefront today. For more details, see below.

Step 2: Recruit fans

You will invite and recruit fans, influencers and employees to join your distribution community. You might have to implement some form of gamification (2nd trends for 2013) in order for them to join your circle of amplifiers.

Step 3: Create Messages

Create the content you want to get distributed through the community. And make it easy for your amplifiers to distribute it in their social networks

Step 4: Amplication Process

The amplification application will inform by email (or other forms) your community there are messages ready for distribution. The amplifiers then can select which messages they distribute in which social network.

Step 5: Monitor & analyze

As with any campaign, you need to monitor the process, analyze the results and fine-tune your next steps. Continue to engage your community of amplifiers.

Who are some players?

GaggleAMP, US based company, is the social marketing platform that lets companies amplify their social media reach by leveraging individual employees, customers and partners. (source GaggleAMP)

Users can share these messages on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn automatically, by e-mail notification or from the website thus giving the user full control of what is getting shared where. The gamification option makes this tool more engaging.

In addition to the message amplification, GaggleAMP provides a myriad of unique analytics about how the messages perform in the various social media networks including message reach, clicks, comments, Likes, shares, re-tweets and more.

Pricing starts at $25/month for 50 messages shared. There is a 7 day free trail period.

SocialSeeder, a Belgian company, unlocks the power of your true influencers.

As a company tapping into the potential of social media your holy grail is to find and identify super influencers to quickly spread news and create a buzz on new products & services.

SocialSeeder facilitates employees, clients, fans, partners & other influencers to seed the messages you want to bring across via social media and allows to measure the impact in full detail through a personalised dashboard. (Source – SocialSeeder).

SocialSeeder, is focusing on Social Media Campaigns. You start by creating your list of amplifiers (Influencers & Ambassadors). You follow this up with the creation of campaign which will result in an email being created where you ask the amplifiers to distribute via the networks of their choice (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ or even email). The user has full control of which message gets distributed where.

A comprehensive number of statistics are available to both track each amplifier and message amplification by platform and hits.

SocialToaster, a US based company, allows an organization to recruit supporters to help automatically create word-of-mouth referrals and traffic through Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. (Source – Socialtoaster).

SocialToaster amplifies corporate messaging on brands’ social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn), proving that there is immense value in social media engagement. Loyal fans of a brand called ‘Super Fans’ are mobilized with an email whenever the brand has blog postings, events, articles, or promotions for them to promote. With just one click, Super Fans share the brand’s content with peers across all of their selected social networking sites. The visibility of the message increases exponentially as the content is shared. (Source Socialtoaster)

Socialtoaster allows you to run in the cloud and on your own servers. Other interesting features are gamification and viral recruitment formulas.

Spread.us,, US based company, is a twitter-only tool that allows you to promote campaigns and blog posts. It enables website readers to automatically share and distribute newly published content from their favorite content or blog on Twitter. (source: Spread.us).

First you enlist the support of your supporters by inviting them. You then create the perfect tweet which will get distributed automatically via their accounts. Then you track the performance of the post through a number of statistics. The biggest drawback of this tool is the lack of control on the user’s side. Opting out is the list only option for the end user to stop tweets being posted through his/her account.

Pricing starts at $0 for up to 5 subscribers. Between 6 to 25 subscribers (fans) you will pay $4/month with variable pricing if fans increase or decrease.

This is the time when everyone creates a list of things that were or things that will be. Normally, I do not participate in this ritual but this year I can’t stop myself. The reason being that the lists I am seeing are so out there in terms of predictions that I want to bring back to pragmatism to 2013. I see 5 major trends for 2013 and here they are!

Participation – Now that Facebook has reached over 1 billion members, it is fair to assume that in Belgium we will round the cape of 5 million in 2013. With LinkedIn having 187 million users, we will pass the 1.5 million users in Belgium in 2013. However, I am predicting a boom of twitter usage in Belgium with thanks to the traditional media. Inspirational is the radio with programs such as #hautekiet or #touché, TV with the hashtag #7dag or #SODD, and traditional magazines such as Flair, Humo and many more. Slowly they are driving consumers to Twitter and thus comes the explosion of number of users. I think we could be looking at 2.5 million accounts with 1 million active users by the end of the year.

Amplification – Many companies are setting up company accounts on social media but they are struggling to get the following they would like to have. However, they are forgetting the “untapped potential” they are sitting on. A fair amount of their employees is active on social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) during and after working hours (survey Vanguard Leadership October 2012). Unfortunately, they rarely follow, like or support their company on social media. And these would be the best ambassadors for your company. Remember the old days when they were motivated to recommend their company to their friends in the real world…

Companies are taking notice and we are seeing that large companies are running “awareness sessions”for their employees with a number of goals in mind: provide information about the general use of social media, explain the social media policy but mostly to ask employees to become social media ambassadors for their companies. This leads to another trends for 2013, the introduction of social media “amplification software”. These software packages will allow companies to post messages on the corporate accounts, inform their employees, ambassadors and influencers about these messages and have them re-distributed by their employees, ambassadors and influencers. Tap into the “untapped potential“.

Gamification = Even though this word has been on the lips of many, I think 2013 is the year when it will become real. The gaming techniques will find their way in which we use social media, learn, or do business. Today the emphasis lies on badges, mayorships, free goods, etc. but the evolution is going to be quick and innovative. A true revolution in the making.

So the biggest challenge for companies in 2013 is how their are going to use awareness building to inspire their employees’ participation to social media to become ambassadors and amplify the corporate messages using a number of gamification schemes.

Companies want to pick the low hanging fruit, but when it comes to social media, it seems they are not seeing the ‘low hanging fruit. Many companies are creating corporate social media accounts but fail not only to communicate them to their clients but also their employees. A lot of companies do not mention their social media accounts on their website allthough that is changing.

Companies, especially the marketeers, are struggling to get engaged fans/followers/connections, etc. A lot of effort is put in creative marketing to be able to attract clients and have them become ambassadors. Through these fans/followers they hope to get their messages amplified.

But what about engaging your employees as ambassadors and amplificators. During a series of awareness sessions in different companies, i could not help to see that few people were actually following their company on platforms such as twitter, facebook or linkedin. The main reason being a lack of information and awareness. Companies expect their employees to follow these account automatically. There are a few simple solutions to address this situation and could include:

Social media awareness sessions

Mention all accounts in the social media policy

Training program includes following all company accounts

Email and intranet campaign to increase account awareness

Adding links to intranet and website

How do you measure if you are successful? Why not create an Employee Engagement Index. The number could reflect a ratio such as:

# of employees following corporate accounts divided by total employee count

# of employees that follow corporate accounts divided by the employees on social media (or specific platform)

This number by itself is not so important. It serves as a baseline. Tracking the progression as you undertake social media awareness building is more important. It will provide you with insight of how well you are doing.

The next challenge is get corporate messages amplified by these people. Here too there are several scenario’s. The best of all worlds is that your employees take the initiative to share message by themselves but we all know this is the most difficult route. the WIIFM factor has to big. Alternatively, you could offer tools to re-publish but that is really a bad idea. People want to be in control of what they share with their network. And then there are some tools available (www.gaggleamp.com) that allow users to select what they forward. In any case, the network of your employees is the first step to client engagement and conversation.

Which innovating techniques and tools are you using to use your employees as amplificators and ambassadors?